by G. K. PECHEY
WE DEMAND of each of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as we must of any other poem, that it shall stand or fall by itself; but The Tyger points—points more insistently and fascinatingly than any of its fellows—to its counterpart in Innocence; and the contrast itself is therefore not unworthy of a few introductory remarks.
The lamb is a creature of sacrifice, and a traditional symbol of human self-sacrifice. The tiger affects us as a ruthless self-seeker;
but what makes it impossible for us to identify him with the Selfhood (as Blake used the term)1 is the splendid reality of the self he asserts and preserves. His is not the hypocritical selfishness that weeps crocodile tears, in the manner of the oppressor-figures of Experience
—Cruelty, Jealousy, Nobodaddy, and the like: such a figure doesn't really exist except as an abstraction from, and justification for, the manifold wickedness of reaction;2 he can only 'exist' as long as some men continue to assert their worst—that is, their anti-social—selves.
The tiger, on the other hand, is fiercely autonomous, magnificently there: a single nature, the thing that hypocrites most hate and fear.
Here, we must be made to feel, is no mean existence. He burns with a ferocious energy, proclaiming his ferocity in his outward appear- ance, and in absolute truth to his tigerish nature makes no apology for it. Above all, he is alive; a part of that great variety of life which includes both tiger and lamb as contraries, and of which the Self- hood is always and everywhere the negation.
A brief glance at The Lamb will do. The lamb's nature is diffused in a naturalistic surrounding—is reflected in and echoed by it, and finally identified, without conflict or incongruity, with both child and Christ; the movement is characteristically outwards, one of gentle giving and gentle receiving, of happy reciprocity, of self-effacement even. The language of Blake's description of the lamb's life—we recognize here the familiar elements of any lamb's actual life—is a language of relatively low poetic intensity: 'clothing of delight' strikes us as the one momentary heightening in the whole poem.
In the plain statement of faith that occupies the second stanza (its plainness is, again, a relative matter) the lamb almost disappears as a presence and an identity; or at most is felt only tenuously in the texture of the verse; and all that that can give us is a pervading sense of the quality of its life, no sharp particularity. An actual lamb, then, more or less naturalistically described, assumes symbolic status; and
82 THEORIA the words which thus elevate it are the inevitable ones: all work to evoke a familiar surrounding, a familiar creature, familiar associa- tions; everything about the lamb is close to us, and the lamb itself is only minimally self-assertive.
When we contrast the tiger we see how right is Blake's choice of the tiger in the first place: its very newness as a symbol—and more, the new associations Blake's particular language brings to our ordi- nary conception of tigers—have their own immediate effect upon us. In his exoticism3 he absolutely resists identification or diffusion with anything outside himself; the characteristic movement is in- wards, towards the heart of the tiger; and Blake is at pains to realize, to give shape to and intensify, this earliest of our responses. The feeling that overwhelms us is one of a sharply defined identity un- diluted by any association, symbolic or sympathetic, with anything outside its glorious and terrible self. It is upon this unsymbolical character of the tiger, and its utterly unsympathetic otherness, that Blake builds: the contrast with the lamb is complete. That by the end we can call the tiger a symbol, and that we recognize an aspect of ourselves in its single-minded wrath—that, in fine, it symbolizes a' latent and necessary human quality—is certain; if it couldn't be shown to embody some definable quality, the poem would lack meaning altogether. Although Blake plainly intends this ultimate response, he knows he has to make us feel an absolute difference from the creature of his choice, for only in that way can its fierce autonomy be made real: a creature we could somehow easily and immediately gather to ourselves just would not do. Far from weaken- ing, then, the focus in this poem only sharpens and intensifies; the subject, vividly there in the first line, is there more vividly still in the last.
* * * *
All that is extraneous to his purpose Blake scrupulously omits.
Concentrated relevance, which, all will admit, is inseparable from the greatness of great poetry, here obtrudes as a positive technique, a method in its own right. What is important is that the tiger—so much at home in the forests and the night—should yet be sharply defined against them, that his powerful independent assertion should be brought before us in the simplest possible elements. And what better elements could Blake have chosen than the sharp clash of that brilliant burning light and the permanent gloom of the forest? The suggestion of permanence and oppressiveness is important. In Innocence night falls over 'green fields & happy groves', and is viewed as the time of rest after the day of joy: night is never allowed to become an absolute, but signifies instead the 'temporal' aspect of human life, day being 'eternal': it is happily transient, and morning
BLAKE'S TYGER 83 can always be relied on to appear in the skies.4 For innocent eyes night is caught up in a scheme that tames it. Experience reverses all this: the world of Experience is such a night, and there's no escape or respite from it. Its boundless, formless darkness—a forest might be circumscribable, forests certainly aren't—must be encountered in its nakedness: it is the condition of life in this world, which cannot be wished away.
Now here the tiger and the featureless worm (villain of the piece in The Sick Rose) must be distinguished; and that 'featureless', with the contrast it implies, is the key word in our argument. Its feature- lessness, its lack (as Blake himself might say) of 'lineaments', means that the worm is—strictly—a nonentity; a creature peculiarly at home—indeed a part of—the night's dark chaos, insidiously work- ing against the wholesomeness of life. In the tiger we're shown life's answer to Experience; here, we feel, is the champion life's uncon- querable resilience throws up for the encounter with it. He is there in Blake's irreplaceable words:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night.
The rhyme insists with simple force, in a context where simple force is inseparably and obviously a part of the meaning, on this violent contrast between the beast and his element. And the contrast isn't simply one-dimensional: after the opening incantation of the name
—perhaps the most forceful instance of incantatory repetition that there is, with its twin suggestion of the speaker's fascinated lingering before the tiger, and his terrified hesitation to realize it in its parti- culars—he leaps into life in two words only, the only two words Blake needs. The simple essence of the creature, what our inade- quate words can only call his untameable energy, is there for us in the rich, strong, rounded sensuousness. Something of his natural ferocity is given in the suddenness with which that essence assumes a solid presence: the speaker's precipitancy suggests the tiger's, and in his tense awe one senses the tension of the poised beast. What the tiger looks like is what he is—a burning vitality utterly beyond anyone's control, constantly creating itself anew in the form its furious content demands. Fire stands naturally for the absolute consonance of form and content, and for a substance or nature which, absolutely self-determining, takes the shape of its own choosing without inhibition from within or impediment from with- out. The tiger burning bright in the dark amorphousness of Exper- ience is such a fire. In these two words—they gather retrospective force with the unfolding horror of the next line—Blake has our responses perfectly in control: there is no need for him to qualify further.
84 THEORIA After such concreteness, there can be no moralizing or philoso- phizing. The questions we ask about it are the questions it insists on: an idea of the tiger would politely and soothingly invite us into the luxury of speculative inquiry, into the safe irrelevancy of yet other ideas, until the tiger is forgotten altogether. But here is the tiger's essence concretely presented, and the moral eye that wonders and starts at it poses correspondingly concrete questions. Take the first:
What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry ?
This is no abstract moral question, but one of simple terror and wonder mingled. Granted that the maker's hand must have been an immortal hand—the hand of a god—what hand, even among immortal hands, could make that thing ? The tiger is at once 'bigger' than any god the speaker can conceive, seemingly beyond any god's power to make. What sort of god must he be who is equal to that task? asks the speaker. And the invention is no less wonderful than the execution; the eye no less than the hand. Even to conceive such a creature is a feat of more than godlike genius. That 'or' works to suggest the speaker's mounting wonder; also suggested—suggested in and through the wonder and constituting part of it—is the truth that hand and eye are interchangeable; that, in a creator as inspired as this one, invention and execution, thought and act, must be simultaneous and one. What the eye visualizes is what the hand can realize. This truth is implicit in the speaker's words, and that word 'frame' enforces it: framing is an activity of both hand and mind; it includes both and suggests their intimate co-operation. The speaker's perspective resembles that of a practising artist; or we might put it this way: honestly and directly to confront the tiger, as the speaker does, is intuitively to become the artist Blake says all men should be
—it is to apprehend what it must be like to be the tiger's maker. It is to know the act of creation as the act of whole-souled deliberate- ness that it is. The hand implies an eye equally fearless; an eye guiding and being guided by that hand in a tension of integration that never relaxes. Any manifestly achieved and perfect work is the product of such deliberate purpose and such taut integration: the tiger's fearful symmetry is such an achievement. The god, therefore, who achieved it really meant it to be what we see before us—framed the tiger in the fullest sense, and with the stern application one feels in the very sound of the word. The real force of my argument will emerge when we consider the tameness, the almost implicationless neutrality, of such a question as this: What hand made thy fearful symmetry?—and then set against it the immensely deepened wonder and terror of the question as it stands in the poem.
The speaker's response to the imagined tiger is the kind of rounded,
BLAKE'S TYGER 85 wholly human response that makes of him an Everyman. In that single irreplaceable phrase—'fearful symmetry'—Blake speaks for all of us: his finger is firmly on his own pulse (and it is a pulse both like and unlike that of his fellow-men: like theirs in that he is human;
unlike theirs in having that fully conscious and comprehensive humanity we call genius). As vulnerable human creatures—because we are men—we fear the tiger's superior strength and ruthless nature; but we also admire it, and we admire it because we are men:
its symmetry is something we recognize and have a word for. Neither of these responses is 'truer'—more significantly human—than the other, and neither is allowed to swallow the other up; they subsist in a polarity that is permanent and perfect. Observe how Blake exploits the peculiar resources of English: the simple emotion is expressed in the long sound and simple eloquence of an Anglo- Saxon derivative, the more cultivated response in the less familiar Latinate word. Clipped and nicely controlled, 'symmetry' offers a contrast with its companion, and faintly suggests a musical disso- nance: suddenly alive for us in those two words is the strange and contradictory essence of awe. Inevitably, and quite properly, one's voice drops as one reads this last line. The syllables drummed and rang in our ears before; now we are responding to the tiger those syllables evoked, and our tones are hushed and chastened. With the next stanza, though, a new and harsher stridency enters:
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes ?
It is in his eyes that the tiger's essential nature is concentrated and expressed; there that the energy of his wrath burns most fiercely.
That the fire of those eyes had its source in some remote vastness is to be expected: the question is, What deeps or skies could have yielded such fire? Of all places where the ordinary human pieties have no meaning whatever—places of complete and final indifference
—that place is for man the most unfathomable. Whether they are deeps or skies is uncertain: the uncertainty, felt in the sudden con- vulsive sweep from extreme to extreme, adds to the horror of a question already huge enough. Blake doesn't need—indeed is wise to avoid—the loud expostulation of adjectives describing the sub- jects of his questioning. He knows that to produce the sense of something the mind cannot compass, it is worse than useless to fall back on such crude means; for any adjective would tend to bring these things at least part of the way into the comfortable sphere of the familiar. Wings this god must have needed; but what wings?
And even among immortal hands the hand that could seize this fire must indeed be singular.
To examine the transition from this last stanza to the next is to
MflTfll c o r
86 THEORIA notice in the progression of the speaker's questions a powerful elementary concreteness: each leads ineluctably to the next—not back along a nexus of causes to some ghostly unconditioned first cause, but along the succession of practical acts that must have gone into the tiger's making. Here is a mind to which metaphysical abstraction is utterly foreign: it is the mind, essentially, of a child, with its great virtue of immediate picturing.
Neither youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools & so are some Old Men. But There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual Sensation.
The man who wrote those words is recognizably the poet of The Tyger. He really means what he says when he talks of spiritual sensation: there is nothing in this poem that cannot be seen or felt as well as thought. From the eyes burning with wrath the natural logic of the speaker's terrified curiosity takes him to the heart no sympathy can move—'pity' ever 'divide'; a heart so remote from the mutualities that govern our ordinary relations that the strength and peculiar skill needed to fashion it are beyond our comprehen- sion. In the heaving, breathless slowness of those two lines—
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart ?
—in the very effort of reading them, the speaker reproduces the huge effort of creation, creates the tiger in imagination. This is a creature whose very heart has sinews: not even there will anything be found to mitigate the singleness of his nature: indeed the beating of that sinewy heart is the condition of the working of those sinewy limbs, of the tiger's coming terribly to life. With his first burst into life the speaker reels into quite understandable incoherence. Sud- denly the act of creation appears in all its enormity, and he recoils terrified from the god who could perform it: the god must himself be a dreadful god. All the dread is fleetingly concentrated in his hand and feet—or are the feet perhaps the tiger's ? The ambiguity seems to me deliberate, expressing as it does not only the speaker's incoherence but also the grasped truth that creator and creature must share the same terrible nature. Scholars 'explain' the absence in this sentence of a verb or object;5 but the fact—the manifestly intended poetic effect—of the omission remains. Blake's point is simply this: that hand and those feet seem now completely and essentially dreadful; they don't need to be doing anything. Ordinary vulnerable humanity sees in them the agents of the ultimate menace and there is no more to be said: such an inchoate cry of horror is the only fitting response. A similar daring ellipsis opens the next stanza:
BLAKE'S TYGER 87 What the hammer? what the chain?
And now the questions are more urgent than before; and it is only as the stanza unfolds, and other questions follow, that their reference becomes clear: the speaker sees the tiger's god as a sort of Los- figure 6 working at his smithy. But the momentary obscurity doesn't
—ought not to—disturb us; and for a simple reason. Violent hammer-blows have already been heard and felt in the tiger's heart- beat : so the image of the brain being beaten out on an anvil carries familiar associations—is precisely the kind of thing the speaker's terrified mind would leap to.
With the end of this fourth stanza, the poem reaches the first of its three rapidly consecutive climaxes:
What the anvil ? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp ?
It is in the very abstractness of those 'deadly terrors' that the force of the expression lies—the hugely comprehensive force it must have, coming at such a climactic point. One can't immediately see, or circumscribe, terrors: infinite possibilities of cruelty are suggested, unnamed and unnameable horrors; and a hand which dares to grasp these must be as dreadful as what it grasps, certainly not less so. But Blake's word—'clasp'—is what we ought to be fixing on:
the word suggests a familiar, intimate encircling of the thing: one clasps someone or something one expects no harm from. To infer from this an affinity between god and tiger is only a short step—a step, indeed, that there is no time to be conscious of; and therefore scarcely an inference at all, but rather an apprehension that clutches at the speaker and forces itself out in a guttural rasp, the more forceful in being implied and not stated.
Tension and a relentless hammering beat have marked the verse so far; now the speaker turns from the tiger itself to the result of his creation, and the effect is at first one of relief after that terrible climax so relentlessly pursued and achieved. Of course there is, finally, no relief at all. All that happens is a temporary shift of focus; and in the quieter, more expansive movement we enter a new, more philosophical sphere of discourse—philosophical only in the limited sense of having less of immediate response about it, and more of the ranging human mind. We could say that the whole 'moral universe' is here more explicitly present than before; that it is no longer a matter of simple terror, though without that antecedent reaction the questions of this stanza would have no real force what- ever. For terror there certainly still is: to understand it we must look closely at the speaker's terms; and in doing this we will find our- selves considering the position, the kind of humanity, he represents.
His honesty is plainly beyond question. What characterizes him